Anton Henning: Antonym

Anton Henning's art apparently acknowledges no boundaries between genres and style. The artist (*1964 in Berlin) lustfully draws from the value patterns of past eras and revitalizes them in a richly allusive blend. In his subversive march through art history, he regularly links abstract, ornamental stylistic elements with figural motifs and places avant-garde and design, trash, and salon art in a dialectic relationship.This publication presents Anton Henning's work from 1990 to the present for the first time in this scope. Selected works--paintings, drawings, sculptures, objects, and seating furniture--provide insight into the artist's overly ornate and opulent cosmos of images. The survey ranges from Henning's early photo overpaintings and black-and-white pictures, in which he subverted photography's realism by means of deliberate painterly interventions, and the jazz images oriented toward the aesthetics of late-sixties psychedelic art to his ornamental arabesque interiors and pin-ups. Exhibition schedule: Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen, and Kunsthalle Mannheim, May 16-August 16, 2009